Design of Novel Inflatable Sealing Ring for Leak Detection Accumulation Chamber

A novel type of inflatable sealing ring, dedicated to the leak-detection accumulation chamberin ground-test of space-craft, was designed to solve the low reliability and poor sealing problems of the conventional non-edge inflatable sealing ring.The distributions of stress and displacement of the inflatable sealing rings with and without edges were mathematically modeled, numerically simulated in finite element method and experimentally evaluated.The sealing performance of the newly-designed inflatable sealing ring with 3 parallel protruding edges was tested.The simulated and test results show that at the same pressure, the new inflatable sealing ring outperforms the conventional one without edge because of the multifold sealing, stronger contact stress, tighter sealing and higher reliability.We suggest that the newly-developed inflatable sealing ring be of some technological interest in ground leak-detection of space-craft.